Poor Johnny. He’s an honest, broad-minded liberal with never an unkind word aimed at those of us on the right, and he was so sure he had the weapon that would annihilate the Donald Trump campaign. He honored me by calling me his favorite conservative, and he was so sure of that Weapon-of-Trump-Destruction he let me have a peek at it.
The weapon is a well-researched article in Commentary by Peter Wehner that offers courtroom proof that Donald Trump is not a conservative. Poor Johnny has pitifully mis-invested our confidence. He’s sure that we who admire Donald Trump and wish him well will have to take a pill and lie down while this fast-breaking mudslide overturns, overruns and overrules any hope we might have had for Donald Trump. Can you imagine? He’s changed his position and still expects to be elected!
Have you ever been in the company of a 4-year-old in the act of being told the truth about Santa Claus?
We learn from Johnny’s revelation that Trump has shifted his position on immigration with windshield-wiper regularity. Johnny points out – and darkly hints that he and his minions will continue to point out – that Donald Trump was a Democrat for most of the last decade, and that he’s contributed large sums of money to leading leftish politicians and has espoused liberal positions on health care, taxes, gun control, abortions and drugs. To calcify our joints in one last terrifying flourish Johnny finishes us off – at least on his political scoreboard – with proof that Trump is against entitlement reform but loves affirmative action.
Bundle it all up. Put your favorite color ribbon around it. Then let it fly – Kersplat! – between the eyeballs of the American public! And you’ll have achieved almost as much disruption in the Trump campaign as if he’d been banned from the Book-of-the-Month Club or dis-fellowshiped from the Gaffney, South Carolina, Elks Club. But Johnny at least reminds me of a story our psychology professor told us at the University of North Carolina in 1948.
This professor had been a member of a top-secret military team trying to improve the results of Allied bombing of important German factories toward the end of the war. We expected much better results from our bombing missions than we were getting. They came up with an idea based on Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov’s famous discovery of “conditioned response.” Pavlov learned that when you ring a bell and give a dog a nice hunk of red meat, the dog eventually salivates at the mere sound of the bell, in anticipation of the meat course. At that point all you have to do is ring the bell and dog will salivate without the meat.
They planned then to take aerial photos of important German factories, spread them on the lab floor and put corn kernels (or whatever it is pigeons like) squarely atop the photos of the factories the Allies wanted to knock out. The idea was to keep training pigeons to peck, peck, peck after those goodies atop the photos of the German factories. They would then take a parachute bomb underslung with a glass bottom gondola, drop it from a high altitude and let the pigeons peck-peck-peck away at the factories even though there were no corn kernels there, just the targets visible through the glass bottom of the gondolas. The pecking, you see, would guide the bomb to the target!
I know what you’re thinking. It’s what we Carolina students were thinking, too. However, they got encouraging results. Washington replied, “We, too, have been getting encouraging results with something else. Forget about your pecking pigeons.” The pigeon project manager roared back, “Maybe you misunderstood us. We’re getting good results!”
“Thanks anyhow,” Washington replied. “And forget about it anyhow. We’ve got something else!”
And thus one professor was drawn into the Atomic Age!
The atomic bombs that landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki needed no pecking pigeons. And Donald Trump and his growing hordes of followers need no comforting labels, “conservative”or otherwise. The voters just want more of what they’re getting. Much more.
The residents of Hiroshima didn’t even bother to seek cover on that morning the Atomic Age dawned. It was just one airplane overhead! Those Japanese had no idea of the forces of nature about to be released. And Johnny and his anti-Trump cadres have no idea of the forces of HUMAN nature about to be released by the American voter. Johnny and his anti-Trump friends still think this election is normal. They don’t realize this election is supernatural!
All this reminds me of my first mother-in-law, who was a 5-year-old girl in Orebro, Sweden, when the first automobile came to town. After seeing one in the town square she ran eight blocks to the home of a professor she liked and urged him, “Come quickly. There’s a carriage in the town square that doesn’t need a horse. It’s called an ‘automobile'”!
“Don’t be silly, Ingrid,” said the professor. “There can’t be any such thing. ‘Auto’ is Greek and ‘Mobile’ is Latin.”
And then he closed the door and went back to bed.
Doze well, Johnny!
Media wishing to interview Barry Farber, please contact [email protected].
|
